


The Diary of Rachel Whitsett

by vaspider



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Dogs, Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 21:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaspider/pseuds/vaspider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The weight limit applies to mammals. All mammals. So how do dog breeders cope? </p><p>Please don't say I didn't warn you about the dog-related feels in this fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Diary of Rachel Whitsett

**November 13 th**:

Far enough post-partum that the argument can no longer be made to the authorities that the extra weight constituted smaller, separate bodies & weight will drop below acceptable levels.  The pups weaned, moved to different kennels or adopted out through the Breed Preservation Society.

BPS warned at last visit “if Nerys isn’t below 75 lbs. on next regulatory visit,” nothing else to do.

“R&D of animal will be unavoidable.” Removal and Destruction. What a cold, terrible way to phrase it. As if they’d just picked up an old mattress or a busted chiffarobe left on the roadside, instead of tearing away one of the few remaining pure-bred German Shepherds in North America from her home, and killing her.

It isn’t as if I don’t know why it has to happen. It isn’t as if I didn’t watch, like we all watched. It’s just that at the end of the day, I refused to let my life’s course be set by what happened to me, by the actions of others. We pushed back. We had to push back.

Breed Standard Regulations followed, and Breed Preservation Societies. We lost some breeds, and others stayed – some by attrition, no longer bred because, as working dogs, there’s little need for a cattle dog when cows turn murderous. More murderous than usual, most of the ranch hands here would say, when not tending the little flocks of low-weight animals -- geese and chickens -- left to us. I said we should start raising guinea pigs for their original purpose once, and they gave me a funny look.

So we lost the Shepherds, most of them. Mom wrote she’d found a group in Portland who’s working on preserving the ACD & another for Australian Shepherds. We lost the large terriers, the retrievers  – Airedales, Labradors? Mostly gone. German Shepherds dance the line. We breed down, now, where we used to breed for median weight. An irony – the runts of the litter becoming the prize studs.

People who talk about these things in numbers don’t sit at their kitchen counters in mid-November, scribbling in a leather-bound diary, pushing the pages down with the wrist of their coffee-holding hand so they can get words down before the sun rises.  People who talk about these things in numbers don’t watch the Montana sun rise in purples and pinks before the sky explodes all in fire, don’t look out to the kennels separate from the house and know that in there a worried dog turns in circles and chews her tail.

She thinks she’s a bad dog. There’s no way to make her understand she can’t be in the house when she’s carrying a litter. One of the concessions we had to make, to save our dogs: they can’t be housed with humans at any time they’re over that weight limit, no matter the reason, in case we’re wrong. It’s been years since the first case, and we’ve never seen a single instance where pregnancy-related weight increase caused A Problem, as they like to phrase it (so fond of their pristine language), but one more family destroyed is too many. At this point it’s a matter of survival, or so they tell us.

As if I don’t know. As if I don’t know what a herd looks like when it crosses the back forty, or have automatic steel shutters on my home in case the fences fail. In case the walls fail. As if I don’t know.

The sun’s coming up. You never know when they’ll turn up. A lot of the time, it’s either early morning or late at night – when people aren’t expecting it, when they’ve let their guard down. You’d think they wouldn’t want to move in the late evening.

It’s not an enviable job, but it’s hard not to hate them. Boots and baseball caps, kids from a few towns over with an opportunity for employment in this economy -- they’re someone else’s daughters and sons, taking unenviable risks, including angry dog owners.

Dog owners. As if we own them like a car. But we’re back to the chiffarobe comparison, and I don’t have it in me today. This has to be done before Leigh wakes up for kindergarten.

 

Nerys is her favorite.

* * *

 

The wind chews through a person in November, gaining speed over flat terrain, unobstructed save by scrub brush and an occasional stand of trees. Rachel’s slow steps speed up as they eat up the regulated distance between her home and kennels, accelerating both as response to that wind battering dark bangs against her face and out of some sense of outracing the inevitable.  Today is a day she will live over and over, no matter the outcome, will worry like a cat at yarn, will spin again and again in her head.

Today exists forever in present tense, no matter what tomorrow brings.  She will never stop living these steps to the brick building with the sun throwing the first slices of lemon-yellow light across its red edifice, will never stop pulling the sharp, hungry wind into her lungs through her cotton scarf’s loose, ribbed knit. These kinds of days are made of details, comprised not of the blurred-together sweeps of motion that comprise most of a life: frosted ground crunching under hard-heeled boots, the beep of entry card pressed to palm-sized reader, the scent and warmth of the dogs hitting her in the face like a rock between her eyes.

For the rest of her life, whether that stretches out to some indeterminate point some decades in the future or comes tomorrow on the brutal tips of a zombie longhorn’s toss-and-trample, Rachel Whitsett continues, will continue, to live in the span of time before the scale pronounced its terrible sentence. She lives in the moments when her access card, pressed against the kennel’s lock, releases Nerys into her arms, when she crouches with the sound of Wranglers stretching at the knees and buries her face in that soft, deep ruff, breathes deep.

Just a second, delaying the feared, the inflexible inevitable.  _Later_  requires strength.  _Later_  requires news-breaking, explaining ‘dead’ and ‘gone’ and ‘never see her again’ to a five-year-old who used the big beast as a pillow for watching  _Little Einsteins_  and Muppet movies.  _Later_  requires Mom. For a moment, she has the space to be Rachel, pushing her nose into that sweet-smelling fur at the side of Nerys’s throat, into the mottled brown-black of  _her dog_ , ruffling perfectly triangular ears and whispering, twice, “Good dog. Good dog.” Leash latches to collar, and down the hall of kennels, together they go.

Tears come unbidden over and over, the wound as fresh a decade from that moment as in the seconds when her heart chokes off breath and the digital numbers settle. For a moment that cuts deeper that any knife when she turns that briar back into the soft meat of her heart, over and over, never able to escape it, the scale taunts her with 74 in its flickering dance before settling at an unassuming number as final as a door slamming shut: 78.3 lbs.

The bitter awfulness of memory, that unreliable video-recorder in the mind, betrays her in the coming years, over and over. For all that she reads back, again and again, her descriptions of that morning for the journal she kept so her daughter can know how hard she fought, so perhaps one day Leigh can understand, she can only remember what came half an hour later: the plunger pushing down, fingers shaking as the plastic touches the backs of her first two fingers. Tears course down her cheeks, lapped away by that confused and trusting tongue that moves slower and slower. The sweet weight on her lap, three point eight pounds too heavy, the steady, faithful two-step of her heart accompanied by bellows-lungs rising and falling, a piece of music  _poco a poco decelerando_  until, no matter how tight Rachel holds, the final rest is played.

She remembers the following furnace with perfect clarity, flaring to the requisite sterilizing degree, leaving behind only inert bits of bone. She remembers sobbing in the kennels until Nerys’s pups joined in her keening, raising their twelve-week-old voices as if she were purposefully teaching them to howl. Remembers the cold of concrete pressing against her flannel-clad back as her devoted companion became an empty object in her lap. No matter how many times she relives this day, can see the screwed-up tomato of her daughter’s furious face at breakfast, witnesses helplessly the anger of a child taking in her first swallow of the universe’s unrighteous callousness, there is one piece memory blots out in its capriciousness, though she could never say whether or not that might be her brain’s subconscious self-preservation, whether it’s curse or mercy.

She cannot remember their last walk.


End file.
